Chuya Ikeda

  
psnv4606@hotmail.com
079 7480 4919

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Lost in translation

University of the Arts London collection, London UK, 2007

After breaking down the tower of babel, we are struggling to communicate with other people and their cultural differences.
My hypothesis was that if we could convey a lost meaning in translation, we could communicate it more successfully by filling the gap within translation. Moreover, if I could express the gap by using a visual image, the original meaning could be more accurately communicated.

I used an internet site such as Google images and Google translation service in this work. It seems to me that the images on the site represent collective ideas or consciousness of the users. When we search something in a particular country, e.g Google UK, Google Spain, Google Japan and so on, we can basically find pictures which are uploaded by the 'native' of that certain country.

I chose a poem, "A season in hell", written by French poet Arthur Rimbaud(1854-1891).
I translated the poem by Google translation service; machine translation. The method is after translation from French into English, the translated article is translated again from English into Spanish. I then continue. The order is; French, English, Spanish, Portuguese, Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Arabic, Italian and German.
This method is like a 'telephone game'. I repeated the translation telephone game 10 times.
The translation of the poem turned out to produce a very similar result using this technique.

After getting the results, I traced all similar words over the different languages. The presentation of the trace gives a detail of the movement of a word. For instance, the position of the word or the part of speech sometimes, has utterly changed after translation, showing the meaning has changed through translation.

I then applied a picture code. I collected a picture from each Google Image site by searching all words which come from previous step; 'the translation telephone game'. After that I secured the pictures with pins in the same position.

(1)

(2)

1. Eternity,
   pin, paper
   950x700x20mm
   
2. detail,
   pin, paper